People are always looking for faster/easier ways of performing common tasks. In the case of dialing a phone number, user friendly mechanisms of “speed dialing” have been implemented that permit easier user selection and dialing of a desired telephone number. For example, when dialing a phone, it is easier to speed dial “1” than to manually the dial the complete telephone number “7814664072” that can be associated with the speed dial “1.” However, a problem with speed dialing is that users must manually configure the numbers associated with the speed-dialing function (e.g., 17814664072, 29785621577, and so on). Such manual configuration tasks represent a significant barrier for most people because they have to go to the trouble of learning how to set up the speed dialing feature.
When dialing common, but less frequently used numbers than those that may be set up as speed dial phone numbers, users often look up numbers in a contact address book. This look-up process may not be particularly efficient, though, because the user may have to navigate through a long list of contacts or key in many letters to ‘search’ the address book for the desired contact. Users may also scan a lengthy list of numbers for recent calls received or made in order to look-up a number to call.